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“I like you, Dekka. I admire you. But one way or the other, you will help us.” Then he snapped his fingers, remembering. “But I brought you something.” He reached into his briefcase and drew out Dekka’s framed photograph of Brianna. He propped it on a table and turned it so Dekka could see. It was not her original frame, and the picture itself had been damaged, looking as if a rat had chewed the edges. “It mostly survived the shredding. I had what’s left reframed. So, there you go: just like home.”
And then he turned and walked from the room as techs in white jumpsuits closed in around her and she roared curses at his back in helpless rage.
Unlike Drake, who had cemented his early victims with no thought for the putrefaction of flesh that would result, Peaks’s people had molded the cement into halves held together by steel bands and fastened with massive locks.
Dekka reached into her mind for the transformation that would unleash her new and terrible power. She was not about to accept this fate. She was not about to be reduced to life as an experimental subject or wired with control devices.
No!
She felt the change begin, a stomach-turning nausea, a creeping of the flesh. Her hands swelled within the cement blocks. She felt pressure, felt pressure become pain, but she glanced at the picture of Brianna for strength and gritted her teeth, bearing the pain.
But then the transformation stopped.
The cementing had worked. She was helpless, her power blocked.
Hours and then days passed, time evident to Dekka only because of the changing of the staff who poked and prodded and stabbed needles into her veins. What they were pushing into her bloodstream she did not know. Her questions were ignored; her threats were ignored; her demands, her recitation of her constitutional rights as an American citizen, all ignored, ignored as if they were all deaf, as if no sound was emerging from Dekka’s throat. All communication was one-way: they would speak to her as if she was a child, and her every response was ignored.
“We’re going to take the blocks off and give you a bath,” a technician said on what Dekka believed was her third day. “Don’t worry, though, it will be all female staff.”
Dekka rolled her eyes to see him. Youngish with a silly ginger beard.
“What I’m pushing into your veins right now is propofol,” the tech explained. “It will put you into a trance state. You will be unable to resist. You will be barely able to move, let alone focus enough to morph.”
It was Dekka’s first time really hearing, internalizing that word, “morph.” But that was not what caught her attention. Rather, it was the careful way the tech explained how she would feel. Because the thing was, she did not feel fuzzy or unfocused or sedated. The propofol was flowing, she could see it drip, drip, dripping in the plastic bag hung just over her head.
Nothing. In fact, if anything she felt energized, clear, aware to a degree she had not since waking to find herself cemented.
She met the tech’s gaze. He had eyes of an uncertain color, maybe green, though in this light it was hard to pin down. She shot a questioning look at him. After a furtive look around the room, he leaned close, stretching over her to unlatch her left hand. And in the barest whisper he said, “Remember me, goddess. Remember my service to you.”
Goddess?
Dekka said nothing. She gave the most minimal nod, then stared blankly at the ceiling, faking the drug-induced coma she knew all too well.
Female techs maneuvered her into a wheelchair. She sagged convincingly, like a big sack of potatoes. They pushed her down the hall to a room with a deep claw-foot tub, like something from Restoration Hardware.
They began stripping off her flimsy hospital gown and socks, chatting among themselves as if she wasn’t even there. They hauled her by main force to the tub and settled her into warm water.
It was delicious on her skin, so sensual that for a moment she hesitated to disrupt the animal pleasure of warm water. But only for a moment.
She’d had no time to experiment with her new power, but she’d had long experience of reaching that part of her mind.
She hoped she wouldn’t kill anyone this time. She reminded herself to take care, to try not to kill anyone. They were just government employees, after all, just techs and nurses, no different really from the three she’d accidentally slain during her first display of power.
She pictured the power, imagined it, tried to define it, to find a way to focus it. Where to strike? How?
The room had tile walls and no window. No way to know for sure which direction to take. So Dekka picked the largest expanse of wall. And she let her mind go where it had rarely gone since the days of the FAYZ.
The change began.
Dekka felt her skin crawling, sliding over her bones, fur sprouting from flesh, hair moving of its own accord. It was eerie, not painful but deeply disturbing. She looked at her hands as five black fingers melted together to make four. This time she forced herself to pay attention, to observe. Not four fingers, really, four full length and one that shrank and rotated toward her palm.
Cat paws, that’s what they reminded her of, these hands, though with longer fingers and no . . . But wait? Did she have claws?
“What the . . . ?” one of the techs yelled suddenly.
The others turned to the tub, gaped, then retreated in a hurry. There was a red panic button on the wall, and one of the techs reached for it.
“Stand back,” Dekka said in a voice that was not her own.
